Places People Change

Places People Change explores neighborhood belonging through three lenses: social cohesion (our trust in neighbors), collective efficacy (our belief that we can shape our future together), and sense of place — our connection to the neighborhood itself. Over the next two episodes, we dig into that final piece, also known as place attachment: the emotional bond and sense of identity that ties people to a place's history, culture, and everyday rhythms. It's about belonging to the neighborhood itself, not just the neighbors in it.Our guest, Ethan Kent, has spent 25 years building that kind of belonging through placemaking — a global, community-driven movement (born from the 1970s Project for Public Spaces) that designs parks, main streets, and public spaces around how people actually want to gather and connect. As executive director of PlacemakingX, which he founded in 2019, Ethan has worked in over a thousand cities across sixty-five countries and helped launch more than thirty regional placemaking networks. Listen in as we talk about designing places for belonging — and making our neighborhoods not just livable, but lovable.

In our previous episode, we discussed the place-based social impact movement and the meaningful results it is producing in neighborhoods around the country. We focused on the necessity for place-based efforts to be people-centered. This week, we offer a case study illustrating this approach. For the last few years, two of our team members, Producer David Park and Host Shawn Duncan, have had the joy of participating in some amazing work happening in the Franklin Park neighborhood of Allentown, PA. This week, Shawn speaks with two of the leaders shaping this phenomenal work. Dr. Samantha Shaak is the Executive Director of the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health, the organization serving as convener and backbone for this place-based partnership. Darian Colbert is the Executive Director of Cohesion Network, the local nonprofit that is the driving force behind the neighborhood engagement, connection, and organizing work. Listen in on this conversation about how a large healthcare system chose a place-based approach and how the partnership is catalyzing neighborhood-level belonging and shared action. 

We are living in an era of unprecedented place-based investments. The movement for neighborhood-centered social change continues to grow in exciting ways. The public, private, and nonprofit sectors are acknowledging the ways disadvantage has been deliberately concentrated in some neighborhoods and opportunity in others. And they are rallying together to reverse generations of this racialized and class-based disinvestment. Today, we speak with two leaders influencing the origins and growth of the field about why this level of investment is necessary and how we keep people at the center of the work.